New Census data – London’s religious concentrations

So, today the ONS treated us with some brand spanking new Census data, all the way down to Output Area level (zones of about 150 to 500 people).

The data contains some interesting headline facts and some fascinating spatial patterns…

For example, fact fans, in London there are 173 people for whom ‘Heavy Metal’ is their religion. There are 85 Druids. Only 64 Scientologists (which is surprising considering how often they bug me as I walk down Tottenham Court Road!). 5,637 Jedi Knights (although no Sith). 27 total nut-jobs who are into Witchcraft – exactly half the number who are Satanists.

As always, it’s a bit of a race for the geography geeks to get their maps out first – I’m sure James Cheshire has probably already beaten me to this and got his map in the Evening Standard already, but here are some of my first rough and ready efforts…

What have I chosen to map? Religion of course (what else?!)! It’s always quite an interesting thing to look at, especially in London and especially since the enlightened now count for a much larger percentage of the population than ever before!

I’ve decided to use Location Quotients –  First introduced to me quite a few years ago now by the legendary Phil Rees (the actual material he used can still be found online here if you’re interested) – as they are quite a nice way of getting to grips with the relative concentrations of different groups across an area.

The LQs I’ve calculated here use the whole of London as a base, with values <1 (grey) indicating a lower concentration in that particular OA for the variable in question, and values >1 indicating a higher concentration.

So what have we got? Well, as a card-carrying atheist of course I’m going to be interested in where the godless are concentrated:

NoReligion

 

Far more godless in South London by the looks of things…

And Christians?

Christian

 

Not very many in Islington and Camden – not sure how this compares with the concentrations of Satanists and Heavy Metallers (and I doubt a causal link!)

And the last one for now – Muslims…

Muslim

 

Apologies for no real analysis as such, but I’m sure we’ll see plenty emerge as more people get their mitts on the data… I may also post a few more tomorrow if I have time!